You forget about who you were, all you can think about is what you think you need. Or can afford. And if you don’t watch out, you wind up like Oscar Wilde’s fictional character, someone who knows the price of everything. But the value of nothing.

In a lot of ways, I don’t think I’m the same person I used to be. But in some ways … I hope I still am.

This is me, back in high school, in Pasadena, California.

When I didn’t know any better.

(I still don’t.)

And whether we do change, or don’t — will it really make any difference?

Or was Renton right (again!) when he said: “One thousand years from now, there won’t be any guys and there won’t be any girls, just wankers.”

Then he added: “Sounds all right to me.”

Dude has a point. At least, I think he does. But I don’t really know, for sure. About anything, really. Maybe the saying should be, “la seule chose qui ne change pas, c’est notre ignorance” – the only thing that doesn’t change … is that we’re still stupid.

The one thing I do know is … I’m getting older.

I’m not the teenager I was when that photo was taken (by Suki Hill, a wonderful photographer who was a friend of my old brother Lito). But I still wear glasses. And I still wonder, sometimes, just as I did back then – and have, for years and years and fucking years – just what it’s all about. Life. What the point is?

I still don’t know. That part hasn’t changed, either.

The closest anyone has come to it are the brilliant storytellers in the inspired, insane, and always relevant animated TV show, Futurama —

Fry:
Hey, uh… What was the purpose of life, anyway?

Professor Farnsworth:
Who knows? Probably some hogwash about the human spirit.

And it’s not just human beings. This dog, lying on the sidewalk in Silverlake, in L.A., just looked at me. It didn’t growl, or bark, or wag its tail. It just looked at me. It knew. And it was telling me. Joy. Woe. Two sides of the same coin. William Blake knew, too. Sometimes, we’re so ignorant. No, not ‘we’ – me, as in I. Edgar Krauss asks, “en donde se exilia uno de sí mismo?” Which means, more or less – where do you go, to get away from yourself?

I don’t know. Sometimes, lately, I’ve been feeling antsy. Out of sorts. Unbalanced. Desequilibrado. Maybe the best thing is just to sit down on the sidewalk with that dog. And wait.

Do you ever get the feeling that reading words is a form of auto-hypnosis? As you read them, as you enter into a text – or a story – or a poem – or a novel or a screenplay – sometimes the words have an almost hypnotic effect. At least, they do on me.

Some of Kenneth Koch’s words do that to me.

He is a poet I come back to, again and again. Some people do that to you. Do that to me, I mean. He does it with his words. With the images those words make in my head … with the places they take me. I’m speaking about him in the present tense but Kenneth Koch is no longer among the breathing: he died in 2002, after a long battle with leukemia, a disease whose name has always given me a little frisson of unease. Leukemia is, according to the anonymous experts of Wikpedia, a group of cancers which begin in the bone marrow and result, inevitably, in abnormally high numbers of white blood cells. No one really knows what causes it –

And no one really knows what makes a good poem a great one. I certainly don’t know what makes certain words affect me in certain ways at certain hours of certain days or nights when my eyes scan them and some of the still-functioning parts of my brain assimilate or process them in different ways. It’s a mystery. Just like it’s a mystery why certain pieces of music or certain performances – I’m thinking of Keith Jarrett’s piano improvisations at Köln – do the things they do to me. I still remember the first time I heard that recording of Keith Jarrett improvising, with the microphone capturing his humming to himself as he played – and the almost hallucinatory effect his music had on me. Rows of notes, flowing, building, pausing, returning with a rhythmic vengeance…then moments of unexpected silence…it pulled me in. Took me away into its own universe. It still does.

Some of Kenneth Koch’s writings do something similar to me.

This poem is one of them.

Part of the hallucinatory qualities it exercises have to do, I think, with the idea of conducting simultaneous conversations with/to various (different) persons (people) all at once. The only people who do that are freaking nuts. At least that’s how normal people view them. ‘Nuts’ – or schizophrenics – or those suffering from bipolar disorders – or those affected by cyclothymia. I know a little bit about the latter two, they have showed up occasionally in my family tree and at times, looking in a metaphoric mirror, I see the eyes of a cyclothymic stranger staring back at me. Who is that person? And why are they looking at me in that tone of voice? Seeing the world through different eyes – shedding your own skin and pulling on, what? another personality? a disguise? Isn’t that what aliens are supposed to, when they secretly visit earth, don’t they pull on a human suit, so we won’t see the real being, who occasionally peers back at you from that mirror?

The whole thing – literally seeing and talking to different people at the same time – well, to really do it, maybe even if you’re not an alien, you have to try … to allow yourself to – to be or become different people. At the same time. All inside you. Whew. What a concept. I have no idea if it’s ‘true’ (or ‘right’) or not…but damn, it sure’s got a convincing ring to it….don’t it?

So does this poem. Many ‘convincing rings’. The places it takes me to – maybe the places it will take you to? – all feel real to me. Part of the understated genius of the man, Kenneth Koch, who wrote these words and stitched them together. Before leukemia took him down another, unexplored road of mutating blood cells.

I read it and re-read it and each time … it seems to take me on different byways and detours, into different places I didn’t think I would go.

If you let yourself take it all in – not just to the words, but the hidden undercurrents, the silences, the spaces between the lines, those moments when Kenneth Koch probably paused, between some words, waiting for the next one to come –

Maybe it will take you to some of those places too.

Like getting in a car and heading down the highway for an unknown destination … you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know how long it will take you to get there, and, best of all …

Once you turn the key and the engine starts, you don’t really care.

To Various Persons Talked To All At Once

You have helped hold me together.

I’d like you to be still.

Stop talking or doing anything else for a minute.

No. Please. For three minutes, maybe five minutes.

Tell me which walk to take over the hill.

Is there a bridge there? Will I want company?

Tell me about the old people who built the bridge.

What is “the Japanese economy”?

Where did you hide the doctor’s bills?

How much I admire you!

Can you help me to take this off?

May I help you to take that off?

Are you finished with this item?

Who is the car salesman?

The canopy we had made for the dog.

I need some endless embracing.

The ocean’s not really very far.

Did you come west in this weather?

I’ve been sitting at home with my shoes off.

You’re wearing a cross!

That bench, look! Under it are some puppies!

Could I have just one little shot of Scotch?

I suppose I wanted to impress you.

It’s snowing.

The Revlon Man has come from across the sea.

This racket is annoying.

We didn’t want the baby to come here because of the hawk.

What are you reading?

In what style would you like the humidity to explain?

I care, but not much. You can smoke a cigar.

Genuineness isn’t a word I’d ever use.

Say, what a short skirt! Do you have a camera?

The moon is a shellfish.

I can’t talk to most people. They eat me alive.

Who are you, anyway?

I want to look at you all day long, because you are mine.

Might you crave a little visit to the Pizza Hut?

Thank you for telling me your sign.

I’m filled with joy by this sun!

The turtle is advancing but the lobster stays behind. Silence has won the game!

The word ‘lucubration’ – the plural is lucubrations with an ‘s’ – comes from the Latin lucubrare – meaning to work by lamplight – and by extension, to work at night. Burning the midnight oil was a phrase I learned as a boy, from my mother, not merely an expression but something that became – and has remained – a reality in my life.

Lucubrations are nocturnal jottings, writings, studies or simply meditations – and all that results from or pertains thereto.

It can be very quiet and lonely, after midnight.

It can also be a time of inner darkness. And sometimes, inner light.

And for me, it has almost always been a time when nothing else could get in between me …. and whatever I have been holding, hiding, or incubating inside.

Some of my lucubrations come to light, sometimes. Others never will.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

And then, hearing or imagining he hears, a faint tapping, he (the Poe-ian narrator) stands:

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;

Doubting and dreaming are part of it, too. Always have been. I write these words in the harsh, pale light of morning – but I am thinking of the darkness ahead …. and the lucubrations that await.

Arthur Cleveland Coxe, the 2nd Episocopal Bishop of Western New York in the 19th Century, was an author as well as a man of the cloth and spirit. Among his works is a long poem that he titled: “Halloween, a Romaunt” – using the archaic term for a prose ‘romance’. The poem was first published in 1840, though In his ‘Afterword’, Coxe notes that he wrote it much earlier, when he was a young man of 20. He also notes that the term Halloween is a ‘Scotticism’, and he describes the celebration of Halloween as the vigil which precedes All Saints Day. The night before – the ‘eve – hence, All Hallows Eve. He’s using the word ‘hallow’ in a spiritual sense – the etymology of ‘hallow’ is derived from an Olde English adjective, meaning ‘the holy man’ – though to many, a ‘Hallow’ can also be a spirit….or a ghost.

In his poem, Coxe writes – There is a world in which we dwell; And yet a world invisible!

But he adds that ordinary human eyes are not capable of viewing the spirit denizens who populate the world of All Hallows Eve – I tell ye, that, this very hour, Had but your sight a spirit’s power, Ye would be looking, eye to eye, At a terrific company! If we mortals were only capable, Coxe implies, you would see that – A thousand shapes are at your side

Today, as I write these words – nearly 175 years after Coxe published his Halloween verses – we no longer need the magic sight or ‘spirit’s power’ that our forbears believed were necessary to glimpse these thousand shapes – What Coxe also calls – a thousand, hellish demon sprites –

Because in 2014, they all come out to play on All Hallows Eve – during the 24 hour period we now universally refer to as Halloween. And in Ashland, Oregon – my former adopted hometown, and home as well not only to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival but also to numerous small Theatre companies, there is an almost Shakespearian vibe in the air on Halloween –

I went there, last week, in the company of many others, and for a few hours, all cars and automobiles were banned from the streets – And I found myself in the middle of this ritual gathering of which Coxe wrote nearly two centuries earlier, with all the spirits and magical sprites he mentioned, and other beings as well – from mythical Giants –

To the magical beasts –

The ancient Deities that walk the earth again –

A time when giant birds descend from the skies to walk alongside humans again –

And when humans themselves unfurl their own hidden wings –

Where werewolves and vampires rub shoulders with mortals, young and old –

The ordinary rules and preconceptions no longer seem to apply. With a few deft and artistic strokes of the makeup brush, different beings are revealed –

And new ones emerge –

And hitherto unsuspected temperaments may be revealed –

Mark Twain once commented that “clothes make the man”. And if we happen to see a Biker – or a Ballerina – we might make the mistake of thinking that we know who they are, solely from their garb –

But that would be a mistake – just as it would be a mistake to suppose that the only activity which interests a pale-faced zombie would be appeasing the hunger pangs of the undead. But when this zombie moves her bow across the strings –

We discover differently. You can’t judge someone only by what they wear. You have to look at what they do, as well – and if you take the time to really look, you may be rewarded –

But if indeed clothing does not ‘make’ the person, what can be said of the highest of all forms of clothing, that which surmounts all others …. the hat? Was the Mad Hatter whom Alice met in Wonderful ‘mad’ because of his hat? Or in spite of it? On Halloween, hats and headgear seem to possess some of magical or transformative capabilities that J.K. Rowling has written of. There are ancient hats whose writhing Medusa snakes may turn their viewers to stone –

And flowering hats whose rose aromas assail our nostrils –

And some headgear that just makes one grin –

And then there is the kind of headgear that Neil Gaiman speaks of – “some hats can only be worn if you’re willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you’re only a step away from dancing”

Some Halloween headgear has a quiet, almost incongruous formality, buttressed by a sly sense of hat humor. Or as Ira Gershwin wrote – The way you wear your hat, The way you sip your tea, The mem’ry of all that — No, no! They can’t take that away from me!

While Dr. Seuss, in The Cat in the Hat, notes quite aptly , a propos of both hats – and cats – and other things as well – Look at me!Look at me!Look at me NOW!It is fun to have funBut you have to know how.

Mark Twain wrote – “Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.” Though he may never have suspected it, there are actually some hats which, magically, on All Hallows Eve, can transform a person into the pirate she’s always longed to be –

But sometimes, when neither the clothing nor the headgear above it are sufficient, and in accordance with the ancient pre-Halloween Samhain traditions of mumming and guising, the modern reveler in search of transformation (both outer and inner) turns to the age-old remedy – to the antidote for the humdrum and the boring, for the predictable and the knowable – a cure which can also be a disease in itself – The Mask.

The reasons we wear masks are myriad and mysterious. William Goldman, in “The Princess Bride”, suggests one reason – “Why do you wear a mask and hood?”I think everybody will in the near future,” was the man in black’s reply. “They’re terribly comfortable.”

Novelist Jim Butcher suggests another – that we crave ways to escape the quotidian – “Life would be unbearably dull if we had answers to all our questions.”

While Gabriel García Márquez suggests still another reason – the need to mask the deepest of emotions … including love – “She had never imagined that curiosty was one of the many masks of love.”

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born four years after Arthur Cleveland Coxe published his Halloween poem. Nietzsche had his own ideas about masks, quite a lot of them. He believed that – “Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing.”

Novelist Christopher Barzak (why is it, by the way, that so many of the best words…come from good writers?) suggests that – “Nothing is more real than the masks we make to show each other who we are.”

And then finally there is my favorite, the simple words of René Descartes – “Masked, I advance.”

Of course, since it’s 2014, no Halloween festivities or revels would be complete without something that was not merely unknown but unimaginable back in 1840, when Coxe published his Halloween Romaunt – the ever-present cell-photographers who seem to define our New Millennium more than any other life form. But on All Hallows Eve, in the streets of Ashland, Oregon, they were both festive –

And dramatic –

And no celebration of All Hallows Eve – would be complete without… The Dead. And their brethren, the Undead. They come in many forms –

In all ages –

And in spite of their ghastly appearance, they seem to share the same family values of the ‘breathers’ aka the Living – including shared hugs –

And romance. Leo Tolstoy wrote that “every heart has its own skeletons” – but he neglected to mention that, on the days when the Dead walk again, skeletons – or Calaveras as they are known in Mexico, have not only hearts…but flowers as well –

And lest anyone get the wrong idea, we humans don’t really need to put on a costume, a disguise, face-paint or a mask to hide ourselves – or to find ourselves. None of that is necessary. You can just….be yourself –

Way back in 1963, Sydney Carter composed a hymn, inspired by both traditional English folksongs and carols, and American Shaker music. It was called “Lord of the Dance”. Among other things, it is about dancing – and ritual celebrations. One of the verses goes like this – Dance, dance, wherever you may be I am the lord of the dance, said he And I lead you all, wherever you may be And I lead you all in the dance, said he When I went to the Ashland Halloween parade and revels last week, there was music everywhere – and everyone was dancing in the streets –

And there were many lords – and ladies – who graced us with their regal presence –

But after a long day and night when the spirits and souls of the departed walk and dance among us – after the last dance and the last overly-sugared Halloween candy – life returns to normal. And life, as Albert Einstein once said, “is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

It started just before Christmas, wandering the aisles of my local smalltown supermarket here in Talent, Oregon. I turned around – and there they all were, staring at me.

Supermarket stuffed Friends

I had the impression that they were good friends. Mark Twain said, “Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.” If you are stuck in a cage at the Supermarket, one out of three isn’t bad.

A week later, it was nearly Christmas Eve. ‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house…not a creature was stirring, not even a…

Frog?

Well of course none of the Frogs were stirring because they were caught in netting – and waiting with Zen-like patience to be adopted into a new home (and presumably one with a bathtub to feature their floating rubber talents).

Supermarket Frogs

Mark Twain also wrote, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

Hmmmm….a different take on the traditional Christmas Dinner, that’s for damn sure. I thought about that for a moment but then got distracted by a faint nearby birdcall….that sounded suspiciously like…

Quacking?

In a Supermarket?

Rubber Duckies

Douglas Adams writes that – “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.”

But had he encountered this trio, I wonder what Douglas would have made of them? Whereas I, being the weird person that I am, immediately wondered: do ducks have…grandmothers? If so, when Litte Red Riding Duck goes to visit her Grandma Duckie in that lonely house in the bullrushes, would she say to her – ‘But Grandma, what big lips you have?’ To which Grandma, if I know her (and if I don’t…who does?) would be sure to answer, ‘They aren’t lips, Duckie…that’s my Bill, damnit!’

Kenneth Grahame, of ‘Wind in the Willows’ fame, once wrote a short poem about ducks and, among other things, their bills –

“All along the backwater,
Through the rushes tall,
Ducks are a-dabbling,
Up tails all!

But my trio of Supermarket ducks neither dabbled nor quivered. They just stared fixedly at me, with those borderline frightening smiles that made me wonder: do rubber duckies come to life, Toy-Story-style, when all the humans have left the premises?

And if they do….will they keep on smiling? or will those red grinning duckbills reveal the razor-sharp fangs of….a Vampire Duck?

Needless to say, I got the Hell out of there. A week later, I was down in the Bay Area, visiting a cool museum in Oakland where my older brother had taken me, and I stuck my nose into the Museum store…only to find a row of noses pointed directly back at me…

Bear Travel Pillows

I was speechless. I just stared back…incapable of words. Perhaps a few short monosyllabic grunts. No loss, my momentary inability to communicate verbally with my silent stuffed interlocutors. Gustave Flaubert said that, “human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to” – and momentarily it flashed through my frozen synapses that perhaps if I started tapping out a rhythm…they would all join in?

Three months later, I found myself entering the small, local Medford airport, en route from Point A to Point B. And who should be there waiting for me but….two incredibly lifelike canines, pointing the way with their muzzles and eyes to the Airport’s special ‘Pet Relief Area’.

Pet Relief Area

Birds do it. Bees do it. Pets do it too. But do plastic dogs do it as well? In the wee wee predawn hours, when the entire world around them sleeps, do they carefully step down from their plastic pedestal and make their way over for a little plastic relief of their own? A generation ago, Philip K. Dick famously asked whether or not Androids dream of Electric Sheep? I couldn’t – and still can’t – help wondering….whether plastic dogs dream of plastic streams of pee…onto plastic fire hydrants?

Weeks later, returning to southern Oregon, I visited the cavernous costume and prop repository for a well-known local Theater company. Other visitors walked around, taking in their surroundings with an eye-level POV, but my view was yanked down, as though by the pull of an enormous unseen magnetic force, to meet another pair of eyes, staring not so much at me…but out into what seemed like an interminable void.

Dear Head

This was no stuffed toy. This was the real thing: an immense seemingly larger-than-life stuffed deer’s head. I couldn’t stop staring. And thinking…what his life had been like, back when he was still….alive? Did he run, did he leap, did he twist agilely in the air? At the moment of his death, did everything come to a quick clean end? Or was it drawn out? One of my all-time favorite storytellers, the late Philip K. Dick, once wrote that, “The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer.” Staring at this now-still deer’s head, face and eye, I felt momentarily balanced on a different kind of razor’s edge – the horns of a moral dilemma, so to speak – as this animal’s life and death seemed to come rushing back at me with whirlwind force, impossible to resist.

So I just looked at him. And then took his picture. Many so-called ‘primitive’ peoples believe the act of photographing someone – is akin to robbing them of their soul. But I wasn’t doing that with my newfound deer – it felt, au contraire, that I was trying, in some small arcane way, to restore part of his lost soul, or spirit, or whatever you want to call it, to him.

Time passed. I returned to my local Supermarket, where it all began. Life, or my existence, is apparently circular…what goes around, comes around. Once more I walked down those aisles…the small stuffed large-eyed Friends were gone, and the Frogs and Duckies had departed. It was an unseasonably sunny, warm, Spring day…the perfect weather to take a long nap after lunch, Siesta time for those south of the border. And then….I saw them.

Napping away, comfortably. The palomino horse’s head nestled comfortably against the torso of his friend, the alligator.

la hora de la Siesta en el Supermercado

Augusten Burroughs, the brilliant and often twisted humorist, writes that, “Bad news should be followed with soup. Then a nap.” I don’t know what the news was or had been. Or in fact if these two stuffed friends had had any soup. But they were definitely napping. I stared. I stifled a yawn. Somehow everything seemed to s-l-o-w down….. When my eyelids, impossibly heavy, began to close, I knew it was time to get the Hell out of Dodge…before succumbing to the same deadly NTS (Need To Sleep) that nearly did in Odysseus’s men when they passed out in the Cyclops’s cave. I muttered quick farewells to the Nappers and made my getaway.

Days later, in the organic food supermarket, in neighboring Ashland, I needed some veggies. I went to the Produce Department. And there, swinging lackadaisically from a wooden frame above the bananas – was this individual –

Produce Department Simian

Belying his seemingly relaxed stance (is it a ‘stance’ when you’re hanging from something? No? didn’t think so…), his eyes seemed sharp and glittering. They never missed a trick. They seemed to find me and ask me – yo, human bipedal dude, what IS your problem? We, the stuffed animals of the world, are in fact the dominant species so if you’re smart, you’ll a) get used to it, b) suck it up, and c) bring me the juiciest banana of the bunch….or else.

Stephen Hawking says that we humans are, “just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star.” I think he’s got a point. And while some of you, my fellow monkeys, may be the advanced ones he speaks of, my growing fear is that, with my apparently insatiable obsession with small stuffed or plastic animals, ‘advanced’ is not the right adjective that springs to mind. More like…perturbed.

Which (the state of perturbation) brought me, this last Sunday, to one more supermarket. In search, believe it or not, for donuts. And it being March, the aisles were festooned with chocolate eggs and other sweets in secular, sugar-drenched honor of the forthcoming Easter Holiday. And then I saw them, in the middle of an aisle…all lined up together, tiny heads and tiny ears and tiny eyes…

The Easter Bunnies.

Waiting with something akin to hope on their small furry visages…

Easter Bunnies

But maybe it wasn’t hope. Maybe I need my glasses. Maybe it was just….resignation. But I don’t think so. Coretta Scott King writes that –

“When Good Friday comes, these are the moments in life when we feel there’s no hope. But then, Easter comes.”

Easter is coming. And hope – for a better day, a better life, maybe a better existence for so many who need it so badly – isn’t entirely dead. You can see it, right there, in that small furry face….

Like thousands and millions of other American teenagers, I acquired a fondness for them. Perhaps not an outright addiction, but I ate my fair share.

But Ding-Dongs have existed before their sweet junkfood iteration in popular culture in many forms.

A Ding-Dong is a slang term for a moron, an idiot, someone who ain’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

It’s also the sound made by a doorbell…

As well as a vulgar synonym for a portion of the male anatomy which you can imagine.

It’s inspired storytellers in many different media, including Comic Books and Graphic Novels…

And though ‘Ding-Dong’ is traditionally associated not only with the sound of bells but often with Holiday or Christmas-y lyrics, it’s also inspired other, more tongue-in-cheek interpretations, including this classic porcine version –

For the more traditionally inclined, there is a Ding Dong version of an apocryphal saying often attributed to the British Royals –

And last but not least, no true appreciator or partisan or student of Ding-Dongology will want to miss some of the classic early advertising efforts that Hostess put forth, back in 1967, which seem both twistedly funny and almost prescient in our New Millenium –

As I write these words, it’s a cold snowy winter here in my home in Talent, in Southern Oregon….but I’ve got Ding-Dongs on the brain. And so to all – may your Ding Dongs ring forth….and do whatever else you expect of them as we near the end of 2013.